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I have archived here the weekly Tech Tips sent to Reading Matters. The most recent tips are listed first.
Spring 2002 | Fall 2002 | Spring 2003
October 6, 2003
If you're a faculty member, you can apply for two marvelous technology-related fellowships:
the University Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities and the Teaching + Technology Initiative Fellowship. You needn't be technically expert to win these; all
you need is a good idea.
See the links below for more information: the deadline for the IATH fellowship is the end of
January, and the deadline for the TTI fellowship will probably be the end of February (the new request for proposals has not yet been issued). I'm available to consult with you as you
develop your proposal, too: e-mail me at alf7e@virginia.edu.
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/fellowships.html
http://nmc.itc.virginia.edu/TTI/TTIProgram.cfm
September 29, 2003
If you've bookmarked scores of teaching or research-related web sites on one computer and
would like to be able to use those bookmarks (or "favorites") on another computer, here's how. In Internet Explorer 6.0 you can go to File --> Import & Export to export your bookmarks
as an HTML file to a floppy disk, Zip disk, or your Home Directory. On another machine, use the same command to import that file into your browser. In Netscape 4.7 there's also a File
--> Import command, while in Netscape 7.0 you'd go to Bookmarks --> Manage Bookmarks then to Tools --> Import or Export.
You can also publish that HTML file of bookmarks as a web page with hyperlinks by putting it
in your Home Directory. Check the Help command in your own browser or e-mail me at amandafrench@virginia.edu for more help.
September 15, 2003
If you want to write a document on English Department letterhead, you don't have to beg
sheets of it from Emily; you can bring a letterhead file directly into MS Word 2000 for Windows or Mac. See the TTSP help sheet page at
http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~ttspeng/General_Information/help_sheets.html
to download the English Department letterhead with the UVa logo and English Department
address on it. If you have a color printer, you can even get that attractive blue-and-orange effect.
September 8, 2003
If you're new to the English Department (or even if you're not) you should know that your best sources of general technology help are these:
For more specific assistance, get in touch with these folks:
- June Webb (jep6p), who maintains the software (e-mail etc.) on faculty office computers and those in the two lounges;
- ITC's Classroom Support Staff, who will come running to help you with classroom
computers, projectors, and audiovisual equipment if you call 982-4586 (day), 982-4585 (evening), or 243-4948 (dial FIXIT, anytime); and
- Amanda French (alf7e or englttsp), the English department's Teaching with Technology
Support Partner, who helps graduate instructors and faculty use technology in their teaching and research.
April 14, 2003
When it comes time to create new Toolkit pages for your next semester's classes, you can
eliminate some work by using the "Copy Class Home Page Data" feature on the Instructor Tools page.
Say that you're teaching an ENWR 110 class this semester and again in the fall. Log in to
Toolkit, then click on "Create a Class Home Page" to create a mostly blank page for your fall class. Then click on "Copy Class Home Page Data," and a list of all your previous Toolkit
class pages will appear, including the ENWR 110 class you're teaching now. Click on your spring ENWR 110 class, and all the data from that spring class will be copied into your fall
class page. You can then edit or change it as needed.
April 7, 2003
EndNote is a bibliographic software that allows you to
1) Create your own searchable and annotatable library of book and article references;
2) Pull references directly from VIRGO, the MLA Bibliography, OCLC WorldCat, and many other databases (no typing required); and
3) Create Works Cited lists in any of several hundred styles, including MLA and Chicago.
To see a demonstration of EndNote, gain some hands-on experience with it, and participate
in a discussion about it, please come to Bryan 203 on Thursday, April 10 at 5pm.
March 31, 2003
Now that you have your UVa Anywhere all set up, you can use all UVa resources from home,
including such library databases as the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (an excellent source for book reviews). Another such UVa resource now accessible to you is ITC's
"Software Central," where you can download (for free!) such programs as Norton AntiVirus 7.6 and the Home Directory Login Program. Go to
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/desktop/central
to browse through all the programs for your operating system. Also, if you don't feel
comfortable downloading software, you can get a CD with all the same programs on it by showing ID at the Help Desk in Wilson 235.
March 24, 2003
How knowledgeable are you about computer file sizes? Here's the table:
1,000 bytes = 1 kilobyte (Kb)
1,000 kilobytes = 1 megabyte (Mb)
1,000 megabytes = 1 gigabyte (Gb)
1,000 gigabytes = 1 terabyte (Tb)
To put this in perspective, here's another table of the approximate minimum capacity of the most common storage devices:
1 floppy disk = 1.4 Mb
1 Zip disk = 100 Mb
Home Directory = 100 Mb
1 compact disk = 600 Mb
1 DVD = 4,700 Mb (4.7 Gb)
To see how big your files are on a machine running Windows, open My Computer or
Windows Explorer and choose View --> Details. For an extensive 1-hour tutorial on essential file management and organization skills, contact me at englttsp@virginia.edu or amandafrench@virginia.edu.
March 17, 2003
If you'd like to be able to use the MLA database and other UVA-licensed resources from
home, try the new service "UVA Anywhere." It replaces the old and clunky "proxy server" method, and in my humble opinion it's about time. Information on using the service can be
seen at
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/desktop/pki/vpn/home.html
You can also e-mail me at englttsp@virginia.edu for more information, or call the Help Desk at 924-3731 during regular business hours.
March 10, 2003
Slots are still available for an introductory workshop on the digital presentation software
PowerPoint, to be held in Bryan 203 on Wednesday, March 12, from 4-5:30pm. Contact Amanda French at alf7e@virginia.edu if you'd be interested in coming.
January 13, 2003
Hope your break went well! Why not start the new year by expanding your technological
know-how at the Technology Resource Open House? Drop by the third floor Wilson Hall any time tomorrow and take short courses in PowerPoint, Excel, Toolkit, and library databases. I'll
be there showing off the TTSP web site. See
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/training/conferences/faculty_technology_openhouse/
for more info.
December 16, 2002
Still need to order books for next semester's classes? You can use the Toolkit's "Order
Textbooks" feature to place your book orders with the UVA bookstore right from your desktop computer.
You can also visit publishers' web sites to see their offerings. Try http://www.wwnorton.com/college/English/english_home.htm for books from Norton (including
my favorite Critical Editions), and while you're there you can have a look at the "Norton Poets Online" site. Or visit http://www.penguinclassics.com and see what Penguin's pushing in
India, Australia, Canada, the U.K., and (coming soon) South Africa.
December 9, 2002
There are many ways in which you can bring an author's voice into your classroom--we even
have a couple of yellowing LPs up on a shelf in Bowers with readings by Dylan Thomas and Ezra Pound. But if you can't find a turntable to lug in, consider borrowing the department's
laptop and projector (or using the ones that might be installed in your classroom) and going online to such web sites as, for instance, the "listening booth" of the Academy of American Poets at http://www.poets.org/booth/booth.cfm.
If you missed John Ashbery's recent visit, for instance, you can hear a recording of him
reading his poem "My Philosophy of Life" on that site, which will also provide you and your students with a picture and short biography, plus links to other Ashbery sites on the web.
Don't forget to check that you have speakers for the laptop, and contact your Teaching with Technology Support Partner at englttsp@virginia.edu with any questions, or for in-class
technical support.
November 24, 2002
If you're worried that your students might be plagiarizing, you might want to sign up for a free
trial of a service called "Turnitin." Turnitin checks papers against "billions of pages of content
located on the Internet and our proprietary databases" and lets you know if it finds unoriginal material. An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported that of almost
2,000 papers submitted to Turnitin in Australia, close to 9 percent "included more than 25 percent plagiarized material." See http://chronicle.com/free/2002/11/2002112001t.htm for the article, and see http://www.turnitin.com to read about or test the service. Let your TTSP
know what you think about the service by going to
http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~ttspeng/About_This_Site/technology_survey.html
or by emailing englttsp@virginia.edu.
November 11, 2002
Spam. Nobody likes it. Nobody has yet found the perfect way to get rid of it, either, but one
valiant effort is represented by the Windows program "Mailwasher." This program allows you
to create filters to screen out certain patterns of e-mail, to "blacklist" certain senders, and to send "bounce" messages to those who have sent you unwanted e-mail, thus making them
think that your e-mail address no longer works. Mailwasher can be downloaded from http://www.mailwasher.net/ for free. Contact your TTSP at englttsp@virginia.edu if you have questions about the program or about downloading and installing software.
November 4, 2002
You can receive daily e-mail digests of higher education news pertaining to UVa and Virginia
by subscribing to the University's Headline News Service. Go to http://www.virginia.edu/topnews/releases/headlines.html to read today's digest or to subscribe. One nice feature is the "Faculty in the News" section, which cites national
newspaper reports that quote UVa faculty members--including, of course, those in English.
October 14, 2002
You really need not transport documents from home to UVA and back again using floppy
disks or Zip disks. (I for one used to forget a crucial floppy disk at least once per semester.) Saving your work to the Home Directory allows you to access your work from any computer
that has an internet connection. It's a central and very secure place to store your files. See http://www.itc.virginia.edu/unixsys/homedir/ for more information, or contact me at englttsp@virginia.edu for a one-on-one demonstration.
September 23, 2002
Interested in finding UVA colleagues in other disciplines who share your research/teaching
interests? One quick way to start is to use the new Keyword Searching feature of the Undergraduate and Graduate Records at
http://codd.itc.virginia.edu/cod/
A search on the term "postmodern*", for instance, finds courses in Architecture,
Anthropology, Drama, European History, Religious Studies, Slavic Languages, the Curry School--and of course English. Click on the "Search COD" link to the right of each search
result, and you can discover whether that course is being taught this semester, and by whom. First step toward a valuable interdisciplinary collaboration, perhaps?
April 29, 2002
The Robertson Media Center on the third floor of Clemons Library offers a number of image
collections that you are free to use in your teaching and research. Visit
http://www.lib.virginia.edu/clemons/RMC/coll-images.html
to see these collections. The Associated Press Archive, for instance, provides over half a
million newsworthy images, and is particularly good for retrieving portraits of authors, while the Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) database contains over 78,000 images of works of art.
April 22, 2002
Apologies for last week's tiplessness! I was enabling DNS in my TCP/IP protocol configuration. :)
If you want to read your e-mail when you're out of town--or even when you're just using a
different computer on grounds than the one you usually use--then your best option is probably Web Mail. To use Web Mail, just go to http://www.mail.virginia.edu and read the instructions
on the link "Getting Started." If you have trouble, read what's on the other links on that page or call the Help Desk at 924-3731.
April 8, 2002
You're undoubtedly familiar with the MLA Bibliography online database; you might not be as
familiar with the online Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL). The two databases cover a lot of the same ground, of course, but one important difference is that
ABELL goes back to 1920, whereas MLA only goes back to 1963. This means that an author search in ABELL on "Leavis, F.R." produces 286 hits, for instance, whereas the same search
in MLA produces a maximum of 28 hits.
One way to get to ABELL is to go to http://www.lib.virginia.edu, click on the link that says "Go to Databases," then click on "A" in the alphabetical listing. You might also take some time just
to browse around in the databases listed under the rubric of "Humanities"--there's some great stuff there. Note that the Index Islamicus and the Index of Christian Art nestle close in
silent amity.
April 1, 2002
Did you know that floppy disks decay? And I don't mean when buried in a compost pile and
left there for a hundred years. Data stored on a floppy disk is not guaranteed to last for more than three years; chances are that floppy disks more than five years old will contain at least
some unusable data. Check your old ones yourself and see--this is NOT an April Fool's gag.
If you want to keep your syllabi and articles safe, one terrific option is the University's Home
Directory Service, which also enables you to access your files from any computer with a network connection. See
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/unixsys/homedir/
for more information, or contact your TTSP at englttsp@virginia.edu.
March 25, 2002
Karen Marshall, tireless subject librarian for English, has created wonderful library guides for
courses such as ENRN 482B: Erotic Poetry in the Renaissance. These library guides list dictionaries, journals, online
databases and other research materials that will be helpful for a particular course; included are call numbers and search term suggestions. Karen posts the library guide on the library
web site, and students can then visit the page for help with their course research.
To see existing library guides, go to the following URL:
http://www.lib.virginia.edu/subjects/English/libguides.html
You can also get to that page from the library home page by choosing Services --> Subject
Guides --> English --> Library Guides. To request a library guide for your own course, e-mail Karen Marshall at kkm7m@virginia.edu.
March 18, 2002
If you ask your students to submit their papers to you on disk or via an e-mail attachment, you
can give your students comments using the "Comment" feature of a word-processing program such as Microsoft Word or WordPerfect. In Microsoft Word 2000, open the paper,
select the text you'd like to comment on, choose Insert --> Comment from the top menu, type your comment in the window that pops up, and click the "Close" button in the comment
window. Save the file and return it to the student.
When the student opens the file with Microsoft Word 2000, the commented-on text will be
highlighted yellow, and s/he will be able to read the (perfectly legible!) comment by moving his/her cursor over the yellow text. Similar features are available in other versions and other
programs; write your TTSP at englttsp@virginia.edu if you have any questions.
March 11, 2002
Do you use Eudora to read your e-mail? If so, you might be seeing some annoying
advertisements in your e-mail window. Here's how to get rid of them: Go to the top menu bar and choose Help --> Payment & Registration, then choose to use Eudora in its Light Mode.
This will keep every feature you care about and get rid of those you don't.
If you use an old version of Eudora, you should upgrade to version 5.1, since that is the only
version that UVa currently supports. To upgrade, go to http://www.itc.virginia.edu and click on Downloads in the left-hand column. If you need help, call the ITC Help Desk at 924-3731.
March 4, 2002
Want to go online in your classroom, or give a talk with projected text or images? The
department owns a laptop and digital projector on a cart that can be reserved through Guinn Baker. You can schedule an appointment with Amanda French to learn how to use it; just e-mail englttsp@virginia.edu.
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